Actor Journey : 5. Voice and Breath

1. Through the breath, we discover what we are experiencing in our entire selves. Just try it yourself. Take one of the sense memories that we used in previous blog, and each time you discover a sensation or memory, concentrate on the breath. I think you will find that the breath opens up the experience and makes it more alive.
2. Actors give breath, a voice, and a soul to the character. When actors read script, they see them in their minds. They have impressions and ideas that flesh out the scenario and make it come to life. The imagination of the actor takes away special nuggets from this reading process, which it will use to begin the creation of the character whom the actor will eventually play. 
3. As you deepen your relaxation and direct your concentration to tighter and more refined circles of focus. The breath will give way to making sounds and eventually the voice. Theis is the beginning of the recognition of the impulses that are being released from within. You must constantly recognize your breath, especially when you are beginning work on a character. 
4. Proper breathing is an obvious fundamental acting technique, but what I’m talking about is how the moment-to-moment reality. In film acting, breathing and vocal patterns should be more as they are in everyday life. They aren’t consistent; they are surprising, and they often catch you off guard. This is one of the essential differences between film and theater acting.
5. In film, the breath and the voice can be more consistent with the details of the moment, rather than being a set of preplanned directions dictated by the demands of the play and the performance space. 
6. The film actor is asked to deliver the details of the moment as realistically as possible: a secret whispered and shared in the dark, intimate words that get stuck in your throat, screams and cries that would throw a stage actor out of the show for a week because of voice damage, long periods of intense listening that are photographed in close-up. All these moments must be filled with the subtle nuances of your own unique personality; they are rarely filled by words.
7. The camera has the power to perceive the smallest details, ones so subtle that they would never read on stage, but when they are photographed, these details become radiant. It is the breath that carries the details to the screen and communicates its meaning to the audience.
8. For the actor on the stage, vocal production and projection take precedence over the emotional moment when speaking. For the actor on film, the emotional moment and its details take precedence.
9. In film, when the pressures of performing create an intense atmosphere for the actor, the breath (and the voice) can become stilted and too controlled. When this happens, the actor must go back to the relaxation checking process, focusing the concentration and breathing into the moment. This happens to the experienced professional as well as the beginner. Wherever you are in the spectrum of acting experience, training, and technique, the approaches to managing the problems of shallow breath and stilted speech are the same. From the very beginning, work on these problems should be integrated into the work on yourself and the character.
10. To explore the process of how the breath and voice are integrated into a character, we should first choose a character to work on as a basis for doing the exercises. This is a discovery process, a discovery of yourself and you as the character.